Arrests and Arsons

A service car of the Memorial human rights group was torched in the Republic of Dagestan Monday, in the third incident against the NGO in the North Caucasus region in the past month.

Arsonists torched Memorial’s office in the Republic of Ingushetia last Wednesday, a week after the head of its Chechen office, Oyub Titiyev, was arrested on drug charges that his supporters dismiss as fabricated. Memorial said last week's attack was part of a coordinated campaign to drive the rights group out of the volatile region.

The arson attack in Dagestan took place outside the driver’s home late on Monday, Memorial’s project leader Oleg Orlov told the Mediazona news website Tuesday.

The torched car had been used by Titiyev’s lawyer, who had visited his client's native village over the weekend, Yekaterina Sokirianskaia, the Russia-based project director of the International Crisis Group, said on Twitter.

Titiyev took over as head of Memorial’s office in Chechnya after the murder of his colleague, Natalya Estimirova, in 2009. He was increasingly threatened over his work in recent years, Human Rights Watch said in a statement earlier this month, calling his drug charges an attempt to finally push Memorial out of Chechnya.

The latest attack comes less than a week after Chechnya’s strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov warned that the work of rights activists “won’t fly” in the region.

Putin doesn't give a shit how the local rulers run the Caucasian Republics. Their job is to keep their peoples on a leash. They are free to do whatever they want, Moscow simply looks away.

In Chechnya, hundreds, if not thousands, of people have been "disappeared", abducted and never heard from again. People suspected of homosexuality or drug use have been rounded up and tortured, some executed, without trial or anything. Many Chechens have also been killed or forced to flee their Republic and Russia itself, for being blood enemies of the Kadyrov teip (clan), etc.

In Dagestan, there are reportedly secret prisons, where suspected Islamists, separatists, and other enemies of the State are held, also without trial, brutally tortured, and plenty have been killed too. The previous head of the Republic, Ramazan Abdulatipov, whom Putin replaced last year, as he left for Moscow, to join his Presidential Administration as Special Advisor on the Caspian Region, had also allegedly sent his agents to neighboring Stavropolie region, to murder several men who had protested publicly against their daughters being banned from wearing hijab to school in the mostly Slavic region. The families were originally from Dagestan, ethnic Dargins, from a cluster of Dargin villages considered basically a Dagestani enclave in Stavropolie. Their protest was an embarrassment to Abdulatipov, making it look, in front of Moscow, as if he could not control his peasants, basically. So, he punished them, viciously, lethally...

Lawless crap like this goes on all over North Caucasus. Moscow doesn't care. As one political expert said recently, to Moscow, Caucasians, like me, are simply savages, to be kept in line through brute force...

Only Memorial and other NGOs have tried to do something about it. And countless of their local activists and members have lost their lives for this. And people in Moscow itself have been killed as well, like Anna Politkovskaya...